Arabic Fonts

Application Support

Since Arabic script is complex, applications must support all the special features Arabic requires. This includes supporting right-to-left behavior, positional forms of characters (isolate, initial, medial and final) as well as dynamically positioned diacritics, ligatures, or alternate glyphs.

There are three main kinds of smart font rendering. These are OpenType, Graphite and AAT (Apple Advanced Typography).

OpenType

There are various flavors of OpenType. A number of applications on Windows might use Uniscribe or DirectWrite to provide OpenType support. Some applications might support ICU OpenType rendering. Others, such as Adobe products, have their own rendering engine. Many applications have moved to using Harfbuzz (which can support both OpenType and Graphite rendering).

Graphite

AAT (Apple Advanced Typography)

Older versions of Scheherazade and Lateef supported AAT. However, none of our current font versions support AAT.

Right-to-left scripts in Microsoft Office

This template provides helpful hints on use of right-to-left (RTL) scripts in Microsoft Word along with some macros designed to deal with various RTL-related issues.

Application Support for smart font rendering

The issues regarding whether an applications supports one rendering engine or another are quite complex. We do not attempt to tell you which OpenType rendering engine an application is using. However, the list below does list which version of Unicode an application may support in OpenType rendering.

During our testing we found that the version of an application is often more important than the version of the Operating System (unless a very old Operating System is being used). Unless we indicate an OS version (such as Win8.1) it likely will not make much difference the level of support.